Tuesday, June 12, 2018

There Are No White People, 2 of 5

Politics
Of Illusion

Maybe
this essay’s literalism annoys you. So what if “white” people aren’t really
white? Must we adopt some correct but clumsy term? “Caucasian”, perhaps?
“European-American”? How inconvenient! “White” is such a short, simple word; it
takes so little time and thought to say; so won’t it do?

No,
it won’t. Consider this riddle, one told by Abraham Lincoln:

Suppose you call a tail a leg. How many legs does a
dog have?

Answer:
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make
it a leg.

Likewise,
I say: calling people white doesn’t make them white.

Dear
reader, I urge you to see with your own eyes, rather than with other people’s
lies! For whiteness is a lie. It supports the pseudoscience of race and the
tyranny of supremacism, and it is itself an illusion. Anyone who sees white
people is literally hallucinating.

Racism
requires such hallucinations, for race does not exist. Race is an exaggeration.
It is a genetic tan. It’s skin-deep. It is no more than a tribal signifier; and
tribalism fights for symbols, not realities.

Humankind’s
skill at manipulating symbols leaves us vulnerable to being manipulated by our
own symbols. It is a kind of magic spell that we can cast upon ourselves;
hatred by hypnosis.

How
to dispel such ensorcelment? This essay proposes an aesthetic antidote and a
moral tactic. The aesthetic antidote is optical precision. Mark Twain defined
the moral tactic with this aphorism: